For those that have been watching BBC's wonderfull planeth earth series be sure to check out the behind the scenes film if you can to see what the cameramen have to go through to capture all that beauty, I have not finished watching yet it but saw one arri amira and a red camera being used but also saw a panasonic gh4 with a 12mm olympus lens on top of a custom made helmet worn by a paraglider who had to shoot a birds eye kind of view of a golden eagles flight down a mountain. There was also one cameraman who had to wait over 100 hour in -20deg Celsius with a small heater next to him in a hut so he wouldn't freeze to death only to get a few minutes of footage from 2 golden eagles fighting over the carcass of a dead fox. Pretty amazing stuff.

I agree. An amazing series and incredibly interesting to see the. BTS. In fact I wishe there was more of it.

Yeah, the BTS part is equally as interesting to watch, to make that series must cost a fortune, just the gear alone they use, in one of the BTS footage I saw they used a Canon 30-300 cinema zoom.

"RED" cameras I've noticed, in the main, and Ronford-Baker pods/heads and a O'Connor head in one shot.

I think the reason we with PSBs like the BBC get to see the behind the scenes bits is because the episodes as produced for the commercial e.g. US market are an hour long including time for commercials . No commercials means an extra 10/15 minutes to fill in.

I'd like to see an episode entirely devoted to the production/filming side but then as a wildlife enthusiast I'd also like to see much more of the wildlife footage, particularly of the smaller creatures, that was left on the cutting room floor so to speak. I've had enough of Lions and the like.

Shot in 4K but only transmitted in HD. Beeb hasn't got a 4K/UHD channel so a shame for those of us who have UHD TVs.

Ron

I loved the behind the scenes. The team are amazing i'm in absolute awe at what they go through to get 'the shot'. I think it was BBC The Hunt where I paused one of the scenes in the behind the scenes footage just to Google the price of one of some of the equipment they are using. One of the Canon telephoto lenses they were using cost something like 80 grand. Some seriously expensive gear is used and no doubt broken and damaged in the making of these documentaries.

The BTS are surely very interesting and so is the array of shots that are used to make the whole series . Its truly wonderful to see the split shots of half under water and half over as the Sloth swims across and many many others, its surely a painful process but the Planet earth I was so interesting that they had to step up and make the Part II of Planet earth with bigger wow factor , the cities episode was also amazing and so were the BTS of it.
As a nature filmmaker its so much insightful to see all this , as to what all is possible .

I finally got to see some of the series! I was amazed with how they were able to follow the primates in Madagascar jumping tree to tree, with the camera next to them/right below them as they leaped. Mindblowing stuff

Thanks for the heads up Noa. I love the series, but I just did a YouTube search for Planet Earth BTS and all kinds of cool stuff came up.

I live in the desert where snakes are common. Every summer a few small ones even make it into my house. But I have never even seen or heard of a bunch of snakes hunting prey all at once like they do in this video. I wonder how shocked the camera op was when all of these snakes came out of nowhere. Great stuff! There are rattle snakes here I don't worry too much about but they don't hunt like those scary things. Once in a while someone will discover a "rattle snake den" that may contain several snakes up to dozens or a hundred or more. I don't even know the name for a group of snakes. I do know I never want to get attacked like the iguana lizard in the video!

Iguana vs Snakes - Behind the Scenes - Planet Earth II - YouTube


Kind Regards,

Steve